Finding Solace in Tracy K. Smith’s Prescient Poem “Solstice”

No poet makes me shiver like Tracy K. Smith, and her 2011 book “Life on Mars” makes me cry. The collection, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2012, is a wild, kaleidoscopic elegy for her father, Floyd William Smith, a black man who grew up in pre-civil-rights Alabama and went on to work on the Hubble Telescope as an engineer. He was born in 1935 and died in 2008. Smith worked her grief into transcendence; the work is intimate and infinite—unbearably so. The final poem compresses a life into eight lines:

We are here for what amounts to a few hours,a day at most.We feel around making sense of the terrain,our own new limbs,Bumping up against a herd of bodiesuntil one becomes home.Moments sweep past. The grass bendsand then learns again to stand.

Another poem, “The Speed of Belief,” dedicated to her father, is a shifting, deepening cycle, revisiting the moments just after death; it makes me think of the literal translation of the title of the Bardo Thodol, more commonly known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead: “Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State.” Smith’s poem travels through stages that feel as discrete and expansive as galaxies. It ends:

I praiseThe god of all gods, who isNothing and nowhere, a law,Immutable proof. And if you are boundBy habit or will to be one of usAgain, I pray you are what waitsTo break back into the worldThrough me.

I come back to “Life on Mars” when I need a reminder of the kind of courage and beauty that can only be found in uncertainty and sadness. I love her poem about David Bowie, “Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes?,” which went viral after his death. And I am utterly smitten with the collection’s first poem, “The Weather in Space,” which ends, “When the storm / Kicks up and nothing is ours, we go chasing / After all we’re certain to lose, so alive— / Faces radiant with panic.” In the clip above, I discuss “Solstice,” which, Elizabeth Bishop-like, brings vastly different scales of loss into the frame, using rhyme to braid them together. The poem was first published in 2011, but six years later it has obtained a stunning new relevance.